by Abra Taylor
'Amnesia?' asked Domini after Berenice had spent a reflective moment in silence.
Berenice nodded and opened her eyes. 'Shock,' she said. The word was spoken in the ancient tongue of the Basque people, so dissimilar to any other in the world. Except for the two familiar words spoken over her father's deathbed, Domini had not heard it used for four years, but it was as natural to her ear as French or English. And she knew that Berenice had used the archaic tongue because it was a language more suited than others to the telling of her father's history.
'He was found in a bloody trench at the Battle of the Somme, in the First World War,' Berenice said. 'No one knew how he came to be there. Everyone in the trench was dead but him, and because it was at the front lines, a trench that had been under heavy bombardment for several days, they had all been dead for some time. Perhaps he had been searching for some relative, perhaps trying to deliver a message when he was trapped by crossfire ... no one will ever know. When they rescued him from the blood and the mud, he could not speak, not even to tell his own name. He told me he might have been about ten years of age at the time. He must have been in deep shock, and as people in deep shock sometimes do, he was behaving in an unaccountable way when they found him. He was playing a game with some small stones. And so they called him Pierre.'
Pierre, the French word for 'stone'. Domini had always known her father's first name but she had not considered its significance. Was that why the great stone in the courtyard had meant so much to him? How little she knew about Papa, Domini realized with a heavy heart. And she had thought she knew him so well.
'They took him to an orphanage in Paris. Still, he did not speak, nor did he understand anything that was said to him, even the very simplest things. He thinks they may have talked to him in German, too, wondering if he had come from the opposing side. And he believes they tried other languages as well.'
Berenice spoke of Le Basque in the present tense, as though he were still alive. Perhaps for her he was. 'It was as if he did not hear. When given a pencil, he could not write, and he seemed not to recognize the letters of the alphabet. Still numb from his experience in the trenches, he failed other small tests of intelligence too. He vaguely remembers the tests, things with pegs and pictures. They wondered if he was deaf and dumb, but found he could hear sharp noises even if he could not understand soft words. When he heard the noises he turned violent, perhaps because of the days he had been under fire. When they tried to take his small stones away from him, he fought that too. Your father believes they decided, after a time, that he must be severely retarded or disturbed, or perhaps both. Because of the war the orphanage was very overcrowded, and they could not handle so difficult a child. And so they moved him to another place, a place for simpletons and the insane. Now it would be called a mental hospital, but more than half a century ago such places had harsher names. He was not well treated.'
Berenice went on softly while Domini listened and learned true horror. Her eyes felt like burned coals, her mouth like ashes. Papa, her papa, in a place like that?
Ignored except for the most basic of bodily needs, no longer spoken to because it was believed he was too retarded to speak, the boy Pierre had lived an almost animal existence. He became unmanageable at times, and so he was kept from the other inmates, most of them in any case much older than he. He was given no last name but a number, and he was taught nothing except the hard lessons of survival. He hated the asylum attendants, some of whom mistreated him, and even if he had had words to speak by then, out of sheer hatred he would not have spoken them. At times, when he spoke with his fists or his feet, he was put under restraint or in a padded cell. The rest of the time he played a solitary game with the small stones, possibly out of attachment to a past he could not remember.
'He lived there for four years, and the wonder is that he retained any sanity at all. He escaped by hiding in a load of dirty laundry. He had planned it for some time and watched his chance. He was about fourteen, he thinks. For a long time after that he lived on the Paris streets, sleeping under bridges or in gutters, stealing food, knowing no one, speaking nothing, despising the world. He says that by then he understood everything other people said, but his mouth was sealed in hatred. For three years he was crafty enough to survive. If it had not been for Elisabeth, he might have remained an animal all the rest of his days.'
'Elisabeth?' Domini pronounced the name as Berenice had done, in the French fashion, ending in a 't' sound. She had never heard her father speak of a woman named Elisabeth.
'The great love of his life,' Berenice explained simply and without envy. 'She was the young mistress of an indifferent painter, a sidewalk artist who sold his views of Paris to passing tourists with bad taste. The two of them caught your father breaking into their larder. The artist wished to call the gendarmes, but Elisabeth said no. By then Pierre's only thought was escape, but because the artist stood by holding a stout stick in case of trouble, he did not at once try. Besides, he was hungry, and he understood that Elisabeth intended to feed him. She seated the dirty, unkempt lad at her kitchen table and watched while he wolfed down the cheese and bread and meat she gave him until he could eat no more. And then she took him to her bathroom and stripped the clothes from his back and scrubbed him until his skin was raw. It was the first bath he had had in three years, and the first time he became conscious of a woman as a woman. He was about seventeen then, with the sturdy build of a peasant, and she did not laugh at him when his naked body reacted with the reactions of a man. Instead, she muttered a few words that changed your father's life.'
'What did she say?' asked Domini.
'What she said was not so important, although the words were: 'So much of a boy, and yet so much of a man.' What was important was the language she spoke. It was the tongue of the Basque people. Your father understood and he was electrified. He answered her in the same language, the first time he had spoken in seven years. He says his voice was rusty from not being used. What his first words were, he cannot recall, but he remembers well enough the way Elisabeth's face lighted to hear him. Perhaps in Paris she had been lonely for the sound of Basque. She gave him clothes and a mattress to sleep on, and the artist she lived with allowed it because he was not an unfeeling man.
'But Elisabeth . . .ah, Elisabeth. She was a simple, honest woman, virtuous not with the virtue of the body, but with the virtue of the heart. She was not well educated and she had little money, but she was generous with giving when she saw reason to give. She took the filthy street urchin into her heart as easily as if he had been her own flesh and blood. Soon Pierre was doing small tasks to earn his keep; he wanted to stay. The great hatred began to flow out of his soul. Elisabeth listened to him and talked to him and told him of the mountains he must have come from. Because he seemed to understand much about the pasturelands but little about the sea, she told him he must come from the high plateaux, and not from the Basque fisherfolk of the coast. She saw his small stones and said they must have come from the mountains, too, perhaps from some rocky pasture. She spoke to him of the Basque peasants, of their physical stamina, their customs, their costumes, their cleverness, their history. She told him of their fierce pride.'
Domini understood, because those same things had been taught to her in her youth. The Basque people were the oldest racial group in Europe, a hardy warrior race that had withstood domination by the Visigoths and the Franks, that had produced men of iron will like St Francis Xavier and St Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Even in the time of Roman conquest the Basques had resisted Romanization more than other races had done. Through the course of the centuries they had preserved their ancient ways as proudly as they had preserved their ancient and unique language.
'He listened eagerly when she told him that Basques had sailed with Magellan, that Basques had fought in the wars of the Crusades, that the Basque whalers of Saint-Jean-de-Luz had sailed to the New World near the time of Columbus. But it was when she spoke of the mountains that tears came
to his eyes.
'Your father understood everything as if he had heard it all before, and in his mind he could see the mountains she described. Elisabeth told him he would not have survived his trials if he had not been a Basque. She guessed that his father might have been a herder of sheep, for such men learn to live with loneliness and hardship as few mortals do. It is possible that Pierre had been learning the trade himself, even at a very young age, if his father had gone to war. And it is a hard trade. A sheepherder will often sleep alone for days on end, with only the ground for bed and only the stars for roof. To guard his sheep, he must be strong, and wherever he stays he knows he must soon move on if his flock is not to starve. He learns to suffer and he learns to survive. If a Basque leaves nothing else to his sons, he leaves his ability to endure. Could it be otherwise, when the Basques have survived through so many centuries that no man knows their real beginnings?'
To Domini, some things Berenice said were not new. She was aware that people came from around the world to hire Basque sheepherders, who were prized for their stoicism and endurance under conditions that would drive lesser men mad. Men from the Pyrenees plied their trade as far afield as Nevada and California, leaving to their sons and their sons' sons the heritage of a strange language, a fierce abiding pride, and a strong talent for survival.
'And at last, as Elisabeth spoke of these things, your father began to learn some peace with himself for the sufferings he had undergone, because his own people had suffered, too, and survived.
'The artist died some months later, an accidental death. Your father thinks he was about eighteen when he moved into Elisabeth's bed. She was not so many years older than he and already he loved her. And because he knew he must put bread on Elisabeth's table, he picked up the dead artist's palette and his brushes and went out on the streets to paint, when he had hardly so much as learned to hold a pencil. He tried to copy the kind of thing he saw being done by other sidewalk artists and found he could not do it at all. He struggled to make his paintings copies of theirs, learning as he painted, but he was unable to copy other men's indifferent offerings too well. Sometimes he produced bent buildings and orange skies and hardly knew how he had done it until he saw his finished work on canvas.
Very little sold. Tourists on the street didn't like his paintings because they were too different; they wanted their traditional views. One day someone asked him why he had no signature, and so he asked Elisabeth to teach him how to sign his name. She told him he needed a name to sign. And so she called him Le Basque, a name she said he had earned with his sufferings. She taught him to print it before he could even read.'
Domini remembered the time her father had told her that, the same day he had cut her out of his life. It had not been a day to ask questions, but Domini had sometimes wondered about it since.
'For two years or so they survived. During those years Elisabeth taught your father how to read and write. He stole food sometimes, or money to pay the rent. He had promised Elisabeth he would not steal again, but he could not bear to see her go hungry. When she found out, she threatened to leave him, and so he stopped. Then one morning in a rainstorm he took shelter in the palace of the Louvre, the exterior of which he had been painting from the Place de la Concorde. In his desperation to learn of the art he thought he could not do, he took his last few sous and paid his admission. And what he saw changed his life again.'
During her growing years Domini had often visited the Louvre with her father. He had always entered the part devoted to the impressionists and always followed the same course. Domini guessed it must have been the course he had followed that very first time. The Renoirs, the Cezannes, the Van Goghs, the Gauguins ... she could imagine very well what he had viewed.
'For him, it was the second lightning clap, as riveting as the speaking of his own tongue had been. He had thought he could not paint because he had never seen great art, or indeed any pictures that could be dignified by the name of art at all. But in the Louvre he saw bent buildings and oblong apples and orange skies. He saw paintings of people, something he had never tried. The flesh tones especially moved him. A lesser man might have been humbled to see such works, but what he saw filled him with strength, for what he recognized in seeing these great paintings was the seed of his own greatness. After that, he knew he had much to learn, but he never doubted his own ability to learn it. He started to paint like a madman, no longer street scenes but canvases of Elisabeth. Your father said she was unhappy because pictures of people put no food in the larder. He didn't care; he was possessed by his need to paint. For the next few years he did little else. He no longer thought of food or rent and left such problems to Elisabeth. She was also shy of posing in the nude, but she did so without complaint. He says she grew thin as the stack of canvases grew large. None were sold. When he ran out of canvas, he painted her picture on the walls, and when the walls were filled he painted over his own paintings. When he ran out of paint, she produced some for him, and he did not ask how. He thought Elisabeth must have started stealing, too, against her own teachings; at the time he did not even care. Later he learned that she had taken to selling herself to keep them both alive. She loved him, too, you see.'
Berenice bowed her head and paused in her story for a few moments, as if in silent homage. When she spoke again she switched to French, marking the end of one passage of Le Basque's life.
'She died in a fire, and with her all the canvases he had done and all the paintings on the walls. He even lost the small stones he had kept for so many years. Do you wonder that he found it hard to talk to anyone of these things?'
Domini shook her head, too moved to express her feelings in words. And she had once asked her father what he had learned in Paris. Could she have guessed that he had learned such terrible pain?
Berenice talked on, perhaps relieving some of her own deep feelings in the telling. With the cruel irony often accorded by fate, Elisabeth's death had marked the beginning of Le Basque's success. After moving in with a kindly fellow artist who offered temporary shelter after the fire, he happened to learn of the manner in which Elisabeth had put food on the table during the previous few years. In rage and pain he had started a self-portrait as tortured and full of despair as the famous image Van Gogh had once painted of himself. Domini had seen it; it was hanging in the Louvre along with the painting of the unicorn. She had never liked the work, which troubled her deeply because it was not the Papa she knew.
The studio where Le Basque painted the self-portrait was next door to a small art gallery, and the dealer who ran that gallery had chanced by while it was being painted. He became interested. Soon there were more canvases, more important galleries, more sales, more successes. There were no more self-portraits, but the work remained unfailingly filled with despair. At last, unable to bear a Paris or even a France where no Elisabeth existed, Le Basque had left for America. There he learned a new language and continued to paint of his purgatory like a man possessed. Still young but already rocketing in reputation, lionized by critics and collectors alike, he met and after an overnight courtship married a woman who bore a strong resemblance, physically at least, to Elisabeth.
As it turned out, she was unlike Elisabeth in every other way. Greedy, grasping, and cold except in bed, she had married Le Basque for his already remarkable success. She was grudging with her body when she felt there was anything to be gained by withholding it. Out of bitterness and disillusion, Le Basque suffered through the marriage for some years, taking what little solace he could from the children she produced.
'He remained faithful to her, not because he loved her but because he had loved Elisabeth ... and yes, she had the same dark eyes, the same dark hair, the same long throat. He never painted her, because he could not bear to paint with cynicism and dislike what he had once painted with love. Nor, after a time, did he care to share her bed very often. They had been married nearly twenty years when he learned of her infidelities, not done from necessity as Elisabeth's had been done, bu
t out of wealth and boredom and too great a taste for pleasure. There was little left for him in the marriage. Already he hardly recognized his sons, who at his wife's insistence had been sent to private schools and fine country clubs and taught to turn up their noses at their father's uncouth ways. He walked out on her, taking no more than his paints, and leaving all else to her.'
After that t ,re had been a succession of models and mistresses, all painted with the brushstrokes of a bitter man. Anastasia Greey had been the last of these. As Domini already knew, her mother's death had deeply affected Le Basque; now she discovered why.
'While she was in labour with you, Didi, Anastasia told your father she had allowed herself to become pregnant only because she loved him. She said she had always known she could not hold all of him forever, and so she wanted a part of him to hold for a little time. He was cynical and didn't believe her; he thought her condition was due to miscalculation. But after she died in delivering you, your father learned that she had been strongly warned against the pregnancy, even before it started, and told that it might kill her to carry a child to full term. And yet, as they took her to the delivery room, she told him nothing of her fears, only of her love.'
So her mother had loved her father, truly loved him. The knowledge gave Domini comfort and a vision of her mother that denied the shallowness depicted in Anastasia's portrait.
'He had almost come to believe that no woman but Elisabeth was capable of love and a generous heart. And yet, this mistress whom he had taken so cynically had wanted to carry his child. I think, perhaps, if he had been able to bring your mother back to life, he would have learned to love her after all. Instead he learned to love you. When you were born, it was as though he was reborn too. You gave him back the faith he had lost when Elisabeth died.'